While the
programs sometimes look back to baroque and classical composers and ahead to the
friendlier moderns, the central focus of the annual Music@Menlo festival through
its eight years of existence has always been the nineteenth century. We are
encouraged to look and listen through nineteenth century eyes and ears.

It took me
until these recordings (2012 festival) to recognize this, though the series has
always had a nineteenth century feel to it. That is not where many of our
especially younger ears are these days. The early music revival and modernism
(curiously related as I've often written, thanks to music historian Richard Taruskin) have drawn us away from the music our parents felt most at home with.
Concert programs don't reflect this because our parents comprise their principal
audience!

So, to those of
us who listen less than we used to do to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Dvorak,
Mendelssohn, Chaussen, and Fauré—to look over this year's roster of composers—Music@Menlo can be a fresh experience. And this year's program, which
delivers seldom recorded or performed works by these composers, a truly fresh
one. Bach (Orchestral Suite No. 2), Mahler (Das
himmlische Leben), Sibelius (String Quartet), and Copland (Appalachian
Spring -- in its original chamber version for thirteen instruments) are here
for perspective. But it's the rich, melodic, straightforwardly expressive center
of the western classical tradition that dominates, and as always with the
Music@Menlo musicians, it's all good.

At its best,
this music makes a powerful case for a world full of human feeling openly
expressed, essentially without irony—a world we now are quick to call
sentimental and unrealistic. It is no more unrealistic than the nineteenth
century novels which many of us feel are the core our literature. Which century
has more to tell us about ourselves, reaches deepest into our being, reaffirming
that the world is essentially what it appears to be? A few days spent listening
to this music, played by the professional friends and colleagues of Festival
directors cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, will provide you with plenty
of material for revisiting that question.

It took 'til
the second movement of this reissue by HDTT of a live performance (1987) of
Bruckner's Fourth for me to appreciate what makes it special. (Or perhaps
that's how long it took my borrowed Blue Circle NSL solid state stereo amp to
hit its stride.) Then I heard its uncanny reproduction of the individual
instruments—not something one tends to notice in a Bruckner symphony! Like
the two recent Houston Symphony Orchestra recordings I've reviewed, this one
comes from a red book digital original, though your ears won't tell you that.
Contributing to the sense of the presence of instruments here is also a
remarkable illusion of space and air, a quality that 'live' recordings often
have because the mikes are up and out in the hall a bit rather than stuck in odd
places to enable the dramatic effects that tend to defeat a sense of venue.
Praise be for that. Strings benefit especially from this approach here.

The performance
itself is fine Bruckner—not so reserved and 'poetic' as Nézet-Séguin's with
the Montreal orchestra I've reported on lately—but full of dramatic contrast
that is equally persuasive.

If you found my
earlier reviews of contemporary British composer David Matthews' string quartets
tempting, stick around for this first volume of his music for solo violin.
Matthews writes forceful, whimsical, interesting—sometimes rivetingly
interesting—music. He is a modernist but he hasn't an avant-garde bone in his
body. He reminds me of Lera Auerbach—he will take over the room, if you let
him. I let him and found his insistent musical personality irresistible.

What would
rhapsodic modernism sound like—a Saint-Saëns born in 1915 rather than 1835?
Somewhat darker, dissonant, but rhapsodic nonetheless. Early George Perle
(1935-2009) has shadows of Saint-Saëns, traces of early Schoenberg and
Zemilinsky. But as he develops over the century—the works on this recording
run from 1938 to 1988—he becomes very much his own man, a composer
looking for a way to maintain a traditional musical spirit in the modernist
world. It is this that has helped him maintain a following, albeit a modest one.
He is interesting to listen to.

What's most
interesting is to hear is the rhapsodic spirit win out time and again, despite
having to fight its way through, accommodate, and finally even entertain, a
modernist style and tonality it seems to want to resist. This is probably more
audible now than when the music was composed. Listen through this music. That's
what it wants.

Bob Neill is
a former equipment reviewer for Enjoy the Music and Positive Feedback Online. He
is currently proprietor of Amherst Audio in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he
sells equipment from Audio Note (UK), Blue Circle (Canada), Crimson Audio (UK),
Resolution Audio (USA), Jean Marie Reynaud (France), and Tocaro (Germany).